


Charming Snakes

by Neyiea



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Bruce Wayne has regrets, Jerome Valeska is Bad at Flirting, M/M, Non-Consensual Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 11:17:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19108570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neyiea/pseuds/Neyiea
Summary: Bruce continues his search for Jerome after the Arkham breakout.





	Charming Snakes

**Author's Note:**

> I will never be over the fact that we didn't see more Jerome shenanigans in the week-long period between the Arkham breakout and That's Entertainment. Also, we all gotta face the facts: Jerome is a snake nerd.

The breaking into of an exotic pet shop and the subsequent death of the owner via the giant cats he’d had brought in for whichever Gotham socialite who wanted bragging rights is the news that Bruce wakes up to a few days before his birthday.

The modus operandi almost seems like Ivy’s work, though she was far more interested in the wellbeing of flora rather than fauna. Bruce skims over the article, something niggling in the back of his mind when it quotes one of the first officers who’d arrived on scene, who’d opened the door only to find a slew of copperheads on the floor, irritated at being disturbed. 

Why anyone would want such dangerous, wild animals as pets he can’t even begin to guess at, since the idea of getting cozy with a creature that could seriously harm if not literally kill you seemed more than a little insane. But Bruce has had more important things to worry about ever since the Arkham break out to put much stock in—

He stops. He backtracks. He reads the article again, more thoroughly the second time around.

Most of the animals in the shop had been snakes. Many of them had been freed from their glass enclosures but had been divided by a hastily made partition, the venomous ones kept in the front, the constrictors kept in the back.

The shop owner had been in the cage with the cats—drunk? Drugged? Pushed?—and none of the snakes had come to harm from the sharp claws or sharper teeth of the bigger carnivores. 

Bruce remembers Jerome’s file; he’d gone through it with a fine-toothed comb to find any clues to where he might have gone the night of the break out, and thus he remembers the brief mention of his mother’s occupation.

He feels like he’s going out on a limb even thinking that it might be connected to Jerome, but…

No money had been stolen. The death could almost be interpreted as a punishment for tempting fate, not to mention that it was something that Jerome would likely find hilarious. Whoever had set the snakes loose had, though clearly wanting to leave behind something to unnerve the police, known enough about them to separate them into two distinct classes. 

It could have absolutely nothing to do with Jerome, but Bruce doesn’t want to take a chance by ignoring it. 

Gotham has been quiet, too quiet, since that first night of the breakout. There’s an ominous storm brewing on the horizon, and Bruce wants to find Jerome before it has the chance to overwhelm the entire city.

Under the cover of darkness, his face concealed by a mask and his body protected by Lucius’s gear—just in case—he makes his way to the address and ducks around the blaringly yellow police line to pick the lock to the back door.

The inside of the shop seems dark and quiet. Bruce takes a few steps in and the door closes behind him with the slightest whisper of noise. He stays still for a long moment, and silence is the only thing that greets him.

He doesn’t plan to stay too long, just in and out, searching for any sign that it might have been Jerome who’d caused the chaos of last night. He carefully doesn’t look into any of the enclosures around him, wary at the idea of so many eyes looking back at him.

A noise causes him to startle and he turns his head to see a rattlesnake behind glass, its uncanny gaze locked onto him, poised as if getting ready to strike.

His eyebrows furrow, because surely no one in their right mind would want—

Something hard slams against the back of his head.

He trips forwards, managing to bring his hands in front of him before his forehead can smash against the glass. The reverberation of his palms against the surface in front of him causes the rattlesnake inside to sound off its warning noise again. He kicks a leg out behind him and hits something, hears a sharp grunt of pain, and then he whirls around, his hands coming up to defend himself.

His attacker ducks forward, tackling him to the floor before Bruce can get a good look at them. The back of Bruce’s head cracks against the tile and he abruptly feels dizzy. He lashes out and kicks, and he knows that he lands a few hits, but his assailant grabs the front of his jacket and lifts him up, then slams him down. Bruce curls his neck forward in an attempt to protect his already throbbing skull. His attacker just pushes him against the floor harder the second time around.

He feels almost out of breath from pain by the time they drag him to the back of the establishment, forcing him up into a seated position by bracing his back against the wall.

He feels his mask being tugged off of his face. He brings his hands up to try and stop it, but it’s too late.

“Oh.” A genuine sound of surprise, followed by, “ _oh._ ” A knowing, snickering sound of amusement. 

He knows that voice far too well. 

At least he got what he wanted. Sort of. 

Proof that Jerome had been—still was, even—here.

Bruce warily opens his eyes and Jerome’s face filters into view. He’s grinning, though to be fair he’s always grinning nowadays, but there’s something sparking in his eyes that makes Bruce’s hair stand on end.

“Brucie. What a nice surprise.” 

Jerome’s hand roughly swipes over the back of his head where Bruce had been hit, and Bruce somehow manages to hold in a cry of pain. When Jerome pulls back there’s smears of blood on his fingers.

“You don’t even need stitches,” he says, then he narrows his eyes in contemplation before amending his statement by adding, “probably.” He brings his fingers up to his mouth as he rocks back on his heels and Bruce watches, unable to turn his gaze away, as Jerome casually licks the blood from the digits. “In any case you’ll live. You’re lucky that I wasn’t in a shoot first kind of mood, Bruce. I don’t want gunfire to upset my new friend, after all.”

Jerome pushes himself into a standing position and turns his back to him, confident enough in Bruce’s current relatively harmless state to be at ease as he slinks away to open the top of a very large glass enclosure. He whispers something under his breath, his voice high and soft in a way that makes Bruce think about when people attempt to charm a wary cat closer.

It’s not a cat that’s in there, though.

Jerome reaches in, and Bruce can hear him huff as he widens his stance to accommodate an additional burden. When he stands back up Bruce has to consciously keep himself from looking too apprehensive.

Jerome catches his eyes as he turns, and he shifts his weight carefully even as his grin turns almost manic.

“Isn’t she a beauty?”

Jerome always looks and feels dangerous. Just standing, or sitting, in front of him is enough to make Bruce put his guard up. Bruce doesn’t see a weapon on him right now, but that matters little because the coiled body of the snake around him is just as menacing, if not more so, as the sight of a gun or knife in his hand. 

Bruce doesn’t even consider himself to be afraid of snakes but the one hooked over Jerome’s shoulders, slithering down his arm with a tail curled around his waist, is massive.

“She’s a reticulated python,” Jerome tells him, even though Bruce certainly did not ask. “They can be aggressive and prone to biting, not exactly an ideal companion for the pampered trust-fund babies of this city. I saw her through the dirty glass of her enclosure last night and, what can I say? We connected.” He presses his lips onto the closest part of her body, smacking them in an obnoxious parody of a kiss. “I just had to see her again.” 

He starts walking closer, steps short and shuffling due to the heaviness of her body. Bruce feels frozen at his approach. 

“They’re ambush hunters; they don’t move very fast, instead they lie in wait for their prey to fall within strike range.” Something about that seems uncomfortably familiar, like a mirror to Bruce’s current situation. Bruce had fallen within Jerome’s strike range, and now he was paying the price for it. “They don’t need to be fast over land because once they’ve grabbed their prey and start coiling around it, well, not many can break away from the ensuing suffocation. Every time the prey breathes out the python tightens its coils so that the lung capacity of its next meal is reduced. Spectacular, don’t you think?” He doesn’t even look over at Bruce as he asks the question, instead his eyes fearlessly stay glued to the animal that is wrapping itself tighter around him.

Bruce wonders if this is a show. Wonders if he’s telling the truth or if he only wants Bruce to think that he’s flirting with danger right in front of him. 

He wishes that he hadn’t already thought of this confrontation with Jerome being like a parallel to the python and its prey. He almost feels as though something invisible is curling around him, like he’s been physically caught up in Jerome’s clutches to be slowly smothered by his cruel attentions.

He tries to shift into a standing position, but a wave of dizziness stops him before he can pick himself off of the ground. 

“Sometimes they can grow longer than twenty feet. This darling here is just shy of thirteen, I think. Snakes in general are a bit feisty, you see, and unless they’re sedated or dead they don’t straighten out enough for anyone to measure them.”

The coiled muscle of the snake must weigh more than one hundred pounds. It might even be closer to one-fifty. 

It might weigh as much as Bruce.

Jerome stops in front of him, and his eyes aren’t on the snake anymore.

“They can eat a human whole, you know,” he says conversationally, as if he expects Bruce to find this information fascinating and not just incredibly disconcerting. “There are cases where people who went missing were found inside their stomach; they have to cut the snake open and take the body out to identify it. There are videos of it online if you don’t believe me.”

Bruce’s own stomach churns at the thought.

“I’ll pass.”

“Too gory for you?” He chortles for a brief moment and Bruce is somewhat startled to find himself wishing that he’d actually been knocked unconscious by the hits to his head, just so that he didn’t have to deal with Jerome being… Himself. “I think you could handle it, Bruce. You saw much better, brutal things at my carnival,” Jerome tells him with a smug air, proud of his own scheming. He very slowly drops into a crouch, the movement carefully calculated, and he brings his arm far too close to Bruce’s face for comfort.

The python settles its head into Jerome’s upright palm. It’s unnerving how in tune Jerome seems to be with the snake. Or is it how in tune the snake is with Jerome? Either way, Bruce is far more uncomfortable than he would be if this were a one-on-one confrontation. Or even a two-on-one, if the other being he was facing was another human. 

“Give her a kiss, won’t you?”

Bruce stares at the seemingly placid snake, who will perhaps someday have a mouth that can unhinge wide enough to swallow a human adult whole, and he has to force himself to keep from backing up further against the wall.

“I’d rather not.”

Jerome scoffs.

“Rude. Spurning such a _pretty girl_ ,” he coos at the snake. His sharp eyes flick up after a few moments of chuckling. “Maybe pretty girls aren’t your type?” Jerome hums under his breath and leans closer. “Or maybe you’re scared of her?”

“I’m not scared of snakes.”

“Really?” Jerome cocks his head to the side. “Are you sure? Because I think you are, at least a little bit. Is it the mouth? It’s the mouth, isn’t it. Does it remind you of—” He grins purposefully wide. “—me, perhaps?” 

“Your smile is more like a shark’s than a snake’s,” trips out from his lips, an instinctive attempt to put an end to any further comparisons between the python and Jerome.

But the wide, ever-smiling mouth and the eerie, dangerous quality of both do match up quite succinctly. 

Jerome’s expression flickers; bemused and exasperated with a touch of something that Bruce doesn’t want to think too hard about analyzing. 

“Does that mean that you think I should file my teeth into irregular points?” He briefly purses his lips in mock thought. “All the better to bite you with, I suppose.”

“If you try to bite me I will kick you in the face.” Snake or no snake. 

Jerome chuckles. “No biting, got it.”

He ducks in, too close and too fast for Bruce to dodge, and seals their lips together. Bruce instinctively raises his fists, but he stops before he can start lashing out blindly because the snake is still wound between them and he has no idea what will happen if he accidentally hits her instead of Jerome.

Jerome’s tongue swipes against his lips and Bruce knocks his head against the wall trying to retreat from the feeling. His lips fall open in a gasp of pain and Jerome is quick to take advantage, sliding inside of Bruce’s mouth while the fingers of his free hand dig into Bruce’s hair, tugging roughly in warning.

Bruce curbs the urge to bite Jerome’s tongue and instead clenches his eyes shut.

It feels wrong, wrong, wrong. Jerome’s scars are rough against his mouth and his tongue is too slick and too hot, and Bruce can feel something move against his chest and he knows that it’s the snake and his heartbeat is pounding in his ears because he feels utterly trapped. Pinned in place with a wall to his back and two predators to his front. 

His breaths become quick and shallow; like those of a prey caught in a python’s coils.

Jerome laughs against his mouth, the sound muffled between them, and his free hand trails from Bruce’s hair down his neck, then skims over his chest, then lower, lower, until his fingers are tracing at the bare skin underneath the hem of Bruce’s armoured jacket and shirt. Bruce jerks at the sensation and Jerome laughs harder, roughly breathing his exhalations into Bruce’s mouth.

Even Jerome pulling away from Bruce’s mouth isn’t a relief, because he drags his tongue wetly up Bruce’s cheek and murmurs, “you’re so tasty, I could eat you right up.”

As if Bruce needed another comparison of himself to prey. 

Then Jerome twists away and somehow Bruce finds himself with a lap full of thirteen feet of python.

“I’ll see you around Bruce,” Jerome says as he jumps up to his feet, “take care of my best girl for me, won’t you?” His eyes glimmer with a dangerous level of amusement as he walks backwards, his gaze relentlessly locked on Bruce. “You’re my best boy, after all. There’s no better person suited for the job.”

“I’m not your boy,” Bruce manages to call out, shifting under the snake to try and figure out how to get to his feet while causing her the least amount of disturbance possible. Even if a bite from her wouldn’t kill him that doesn’t mean he wants to anger or threaten her enough that she’ll strike out at him. 

“We’ll agree to disagree, darlin’.” Jerome blows him a kiss. “For now, at least.”

He slips into the shadows with a laugh and Bruce is left with a snake curling around him, a trail of saliva drying on his cheek, and an unnerving feeling that this won’t be the last time that Jerome invades his space in such a way.


End file.
